What is ://URLFAN?

://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information and makes a transparent ranking based on the numbers. In this way you can discover who's a fan of your URL.

Now every website owner can see who's talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the "traffic" of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.

Unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results. Some important factors to note when using Alexa, according to their disclaimer : Alexa only measures sites visited by Internet Explorer, overcounts sites like Amazon, and only counts sites visited by surfers using Windows. You can probably guess that as the web shifts from IE/Win setups to competing browers and operating systems, a more accurate way to to measure popularity is needed.

The longer we're able to gather data the more accurate ://URLFAN will become. We hope this will provide publishers with a useful tool in tracking their sites and how their content is referenced by other websites.

What is URLFAN-BOT?

://URLFAN collects RSS feed information through it's spidering robot, urlfan-bot. It gathers information from your feed for use in our ranking system, we always cite source and direct traffic to your blog. In this way we provide bloggers and publishers with new visitors. See How is my RSS feed used below.

If you no longer want ://URLFAN to direct visitors to your blog and website, simply add the following to your robots.txt:

User-agent: urlfan-bot
Disallow: /

Upon next visit, our spider will remove all pages and links to your site. You may also submit a request via our contact us page and will remove all content within 24 hours.

How often will URLFAN-BOT visit my site?

Our robot will collect information based on how frequently you update your blog. If on average you update it everyday, then we will collect your feed everyday. If it's every week, then we'll visit once a week. Our robot does not visit more than once per hour.

How is my RSS feed used by ://URLFAN?

If submitted to our directory via the manual submission or our automatic fetching processing, ://URLFAN will begin to read your feed and parse the posts for mentions of websites to use in our ranking algorithm. In turn, we direct traffic directly to your website by posting the source link wherever we use the information in your post. We also clip lengthy posts to ensure visitors view your webpage to see the full content of your post. This policy helps us strengthen our ranking system and delivers more viewers to your website. ://URLFAN will remove any feed when requested. Our Spidering robot, urlfan-bot also strictly complies with robots.txt exclusion text..

To submit a RSS feed to us, use this link.